104.5°

In 104.5°, Aoa;87 presents a solo exhibition by Berlin-based sculptor Margarete Adler: five life-size clay figures that transform the space into a walk-in molecular constellation. The angle is no coincidence: the water molecule H₂O is formed at a bond angle of exactly 104.5°. Were it linear, there would be no polarity, no surface tension, no tears, no blood, no amniotic fluid. This precise angle is the precondition of all life — and it gives Adler’s exhibition both its title and its spatial logic. At the centre are three figures of the same man — Man with chicken, Man with egg, and Man with rooster — arranged according to the exact bond angle of the molecule, with Man with chicken forming the vertex: a space of possibility and fulfilment, of becoming and having become, without any linear direction. Set apart from this triad is Medusa — not as a threat, but returned to the root of her name: médousa means to guard, to protect. As the daughter of sea deities, born of water, she is not part of the molecule within this constellation, but its precondition: the element before it binds. On the floor lies Tied up: naked, wrapped in cords, bound like a parcel — a second axis in the space, from the upright to the recumbent, from bearing to being borne. The exhibition is complemented by Adler’s photographic series The days of water from 1994 — early black-and-white photographs reaching back more than three decades and now returning as resonance, not as quotation. Their juxtaposition raises the question of the angle between then and now. Adler models her figures by hand, in clay, over the course of weeks — without casts, without digital templates. After firing, colour is applied in fine layers; skin tones, textile structures, and feather patterns emerge through the work of the hand. The result is a form of veristic realism that does not aim at illusion, but at presence: the figures do not appear as images, but as presences. This craftsmanship is not a style, but an attitude — and Adler’s sculptures carry the trace of this attitude within them, passing it on to those who encounter them.